The University of Manchester will play a leading role in delivering new national infrastructure for UK life sciences.
The University and the Earlham Institute have been appointed by BioFAIR to lead a new consortium to establish the Methods Commons, the first spoke of the £34 million BioFAIR programme.
The Methods Commons will provide researchers with national-scale capabilities for the discovery, execution, sharing and reuse of the computational workflows, tools and notebooks that underpin modern data-driven life sciences.
Led by Professor Carole Goble at The University of Manchester, the consortium will develop services designed to improve the reproducibility, reliability and reuse of computational methods across UK bioscience.
The Methods Commons will deliver eight core capabilities for UK life sciences researchers, including Galaxy and Nextflow workflow execution, support for containerised bespoke workflows on HPC, a national workflow registry with a community-endorsement mechanism, a "workflow observatory" providing trust and quality assurance, a shared Jupyter notebook environment, and API standards for ingesting input data and sharing workflow results.
Tony Burdett, BioFAIR Director, said: "The Methods Commons tackles one of the longest-standing problems in computational bioscience - reproducibility and reuse of methods that produce the results to be included in publications as research outputs. We had a strong field of applicants, and the appointed consortium combines real delivery track record with deep roots in the UK and international workflow communities. Establishing the Methods Commons is a major milestone for BioFAIR as it's the first spoke in our federated BioCommons and the point at which the services needed by our users really start to take shape."
The consortium - which includes support from Nextflow, Seqera - was selected following a competitive two-stage process that opened with an Expression of Interest call in December 2025, followed by invited full proposals reviewed by an independent expert panel. BioFAIR is investing up to £4 million over an initial two-year period, with the expectation that the partnership will extend to deliver the full programme of work through to June 2029 and beyond.
Carole Goble, Methods Commons Project Lead, said: "We're proud to be establishing the Methods Commons as part of BioFAIR. Computational workflows are how modern bioscience gets done, and giving UK researchers a trusted, national-scale set of services to find, run and share them - without having to reinvent the plumbing each time - is overdue. We're looking forward to working with the BioFAIR Hub, the Fellows and Pathfinder Projects to make sure what we build is shaped by real user needs from day one."
The Methods Commons will adopt an incremental, user-driven delivery model, with early value delivered to exemplar communities - including the first cohort of BioFAIR Pathfinder Projects - before scaling to national reach. It will operate alongside the forthcoming Data Commons, People Commons, Knowledge Hub and BioFAIR Portal in a hub-and-spokes federated infrastructure coordinated from the BioFAIR Hub at the Earlham Institute.
